He cooks simple meals at home and drinks mostly with friends at their apartments. The room is dominated by an array of music decks, four guitars and a computer: the tools Kitami uses to make CDs and which he paid for over the years from his meager income. The 180-square-foot apartment is kept meticulously tidy - there is no space for clutter. Kitami, who graduated from a Tokyo design school, says his job cleaning floors four days a week leaves him just enough money to live on and enough time for his hobby of “making art with music.” His pay is around $1,200 a month, of which $585 goes to rent for his apartment in Shimo-Kitazawa, an area popular with Tokyo students and young people. But freeters have never had money and don’t miss it.”
If you have a high income and lose it, it is hard.
Yukio Okubo, general manager at a think tank for publisher and employment agency Recruit, which coined the term freeter in 1987, says, “Although freeter pay is low, it is enough to live on, especially as over 70% of freeters live with their parents. Nonetheless, most freeters find life bearable. More than 70% earn less than $25,000 a year, and the average is just $14,000, which doesn’t go far in one of the most expensive countries in the world. They typically work in convenience stores, restaurants and in mundane clerical jobs. There are now an estimated 2 million freeters in Japan, four times the figure of 20 years ago.
#Freeter meaning full
We haven’t had a flexible system that allows freeters to graduate to full positions.” Until now, companies haven’t had any other entry points. “But Japan had no recent experience of unemployment, so traditionally you were expected to join as a company employee straight from school and stay. and Europe, it is possible for people to go from being unemployed or from part-time jobs to full-time positions as long as they have the ability and will to work,” she says.
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